Comparing Anthropology to Oranges
Anthropology.net and This blog sits at… are both making much out of how dismal anthropology looks when compared with other academic disciplines on Google Trends, which tracks search results for various terms on a nice graph. They compare anthropology with economics, philosophy, and chemistry. Sure, if you put in psychology or biology you’ll find the same thing. However, if you look at some more closely related disciplines, you’ll see something very different:
Sociology still comes out ahead, but anthropology is way ahead of linguistics, political science, and especially cognitive science.
Needless to say, Google Trends is a very limited tool. In part, it tracks the extent to which these terms have been incorporated into natural language. “The sociology of…” seems to be a much more common phrase than “the anthropology of …” on almost any topic I could think of (and even where anthropology won out, as with “the anthropology of magic” it was by a much smaller margin than cases where sociology was ahead). This may explain why many people still think I study bugs.
UPDATE: I realized that in my initial analysis I completely ignored the news reference section on the bottom. There you see political science comes out on top.
The discipline of anthropology needs to seek avenues to disseminate their research and findings outside of academia. I think both sociology and political science have more name recognition and general traction because they have done this. Having presented at an anthropology round table, I found the information facinating and thought it would be of great general value to the community–but it went no farther than the University Library bulletin board. Qualitative research methodology is expanding and has many applications for museums, curriculum development, etc. that need to be shared publicly.